


Your Touch Is More Real Than The Throne Of Heaven

by QueenOfPlotTwists



Series: Yu-Gi-Oh June 2020 Prompts [25]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, If not you've been warned, Librashipping, Mentions of past abuse, Sad with a Happy Ending, Warnigs are for mentions of graphic violence done to children in the past, Yu-Gi-Oh June Prompts 2020, if you read the manga you know what i'm talking about, mentions of child abuse and trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24956263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfPlotTwists/pseuds/QueenOfPlotTwists
Summary: Marik Ishtar always believed that life was Hell.Hell was the shadows and the darkness and the impenetrable stone walls of his underground prison.His was Hell from which he could never be freed.It was all he had known....until he looked into his Millennium Rod and saw the face of an angel.Yu-Gi-Oh June Prompts 2020Week 4: Air/Day 27: Heaven
Relationships: Marik Ishtar/Mutou Yuugi
Series: Yu-Gi-Oh June 2020 Prompts [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1770298
Kudos: 6





	Your Touch Is More Real Than The Throne Of Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> 15 minutes before midnight! WOOHOO!!!
> 
> Technically, this is the prompt for Day 28, but I was inspired and finished it early, so Day 28's prompt will be: Answers :)
> 
> Soon as I thought of something for this prompt I immediately thought of Marik
> 
> WARNING: Mentions of Child abuse, past abuse, past drama, past violence, not graphic but if you read the manga or watch the original anime you know what I meant if not you've been warn. It's dark!
> 
> Yu-Gi-Oh June Prompts Challenge 2020
> 
> Week Four: Air/Day 27: Heaven

Yu-Gi-Oh June Prompts Challenge 2020

_To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you._

_—Lewis B. Smedes_

Marik Ishtar always believed that life was Hell.

Hell was the shadows and the darkness and the impenetrable stone walls of his underground prison.

He could never call it a home.

His was a life of servitude.

His was Hell from which he could never be freed.

His was a borrowed life: one that promised pain, awaited suffering and expected misery. One where every day was a diabolical countdown to _that_ fateful day. Where every night he cried himself to sleep in fear and woke up screaming in phantom pain. Where his lessons were not numbers or children’s books but his father’s rants in his their self-righteous glory, of the duty that was the Ishtar clan and punctured with the gruesome canvas of his back: a grim premonition of Marik’s own future and one that terrified and traumatized him so deeply, he’d wished that snake bite had killed him.

He survived only for Rishad’s sake.

What else could he call such a life but Hell.

What was Hell but the abandonment of Hope.

What did that mean then if he never had any? The only hope he’d had was that Rishid would take his place: Rishid who was loyal and kind and obedient and loved the Tomb Keepers and their quiet ways and their devotion to duty and their sense of purpose. Rishid who wanted to be a Tomb Keeper and would be a better Tomb Keeper than Marik could ever be and who did not and had never wanted to be one. How naive he had been to believe in hope.

How broken he’d been when they dragged him kicking and crying and begging into that room where his own father, by his own command, was to do the act and no one else—while Rishid carved up his own skin with his mother’s blessing and Ishizu prayed for his life—all while his father carved up his back with the heated blade of the Millennium Rod.

He had not blacked out.

Had not gone numb.

The process has taken hours for his father in his mad righteous had wanted to be sure of every detail as though his son’s skin were a piece a paper and his knife a pencil whose mistake he could easily erase.

It had taken hours to complete.

And Marik was there: for every. Single. Second of it.

Until all he felt was pain.

Until his whole world was pain.

Until pain was his constant companion.

Even after it was over the pain was so fierce, so crippling, like a perpetual burning fire across his back that he no longer feared that he might die from it, but welcome death as though it were his one true savior.

He understood his Mother then.

Respected her choice to take the one true escape even if it meant leaving her children behind.

For if life was Hell than truly Death promised salvation. But Anubis never came. The life threads Nephthys wove were not his own. He did not see the gate to paradise: Ma’at with her ancient feather, Osiris with his green skin, the massive scales or the crocodile-headed Ammut who devoured the wicked and was there as an observer.

No, he stayed. He lived. He felt only pain.

It was his constant companion.

Perhaps that was why he’d welcome the Spirit of the Rod: both the one who protected him and the one fed off his pain and suffering like a bloated, gorging leech.

He’d hated the Pharaoh only because he could not bring himself to hate his father.

His father, who he now knew, _knew_ , was a monster.

A monster who had made all of their lives Hell: Rishid with his rejection, Ishizu with his indifference, Marik with his pride.

But still they forgave him: all three of them, though he doubted Mother did and knew the Gods had not.

But though he was a monster, he was still Marik’s father.

And that had been the worst part about the whole thing: that despite it all Marik loved him, forgave him.

He forgave him for letting his mother die, when he could’ve stopped it had he taken her out of the dark,

He forgave him for imprisoning him and denying him the outside world.

He forgave him for the terrors, the tortures and for taking his future away from him without his consent.

He could even forgive him...for _that_.

But when he’d seen Rishid on the ground, hands bound, barely alive, back sliced open and bloody—the whip cutting deep—heard his screams of pain when his father stuck hot pokers in his back mad in his self-righteous glory like _Rishid_ and not _he_ was the one who had betrayed them all...

It did not matter what the monster had done to him, but Rishid, Ishizu...

 _That_ was the one thing Marik could not forgive.

He understood why they killed him. Why, though he did not know if it was the darkness that corrupted them both or the spirit of Karim reincarnated as Malik who killed him, Malik said he wished he did.

That was the day Marik knew that life was Hell. For he never wanted his father to die, but he hadn’t wanted him to _live_ either: their monster, their jailer. He’d wanted him to change, to be kind, to understand, to tell Marik he loved him not because he was a Tomb keeper but because he was his son, that he wanted him to be happy. That that was all he’d ever wanted.

He had been so stupid. So naive.

It was simply easier to blame the Pharaoh. When Shadi said it was the Pharaoh’s will...it was, of course, just the wrong Pharaoh and if Atem _had_ been involved than it was because his will was to free the all from their imprisonment and the monster that kept them in Hell. Even blaming the Pharaoh himself for his Father’s madness, rather than admit that his father never loved him. That he was nothing but an heir to him. A means to an end. A puppet to ensure his legacy. That if he had not died that day that none of him: not Rishad, not Ishizu, not even Marik, himself would’ve ever escaped that room alive. As if it could magically make the man a father and not a monster.

He had been so young.

So bitter. So angry and full of hate. So desperate for anything that would put an end to his guilt and his grief.

He’d been so naive.

He had learned much when he finally escaped to tombs. Learned how his mother could’ve lived had his father gotten her the help she’d needed but let her die once he’d had his heir and thus no more use for her. How, yes, the Tomb Keepers stayed in the tombs and were forbidden the outside world but only those who _chose_ the path remained. Learned how all Tomb Keepers as young adults were given the chance to see and explore the outside world to decide for themselves if this was they wanted for only those committed were permitted to guard the tomb of the pharaohs. How the Tomb Keepers intimation was not meant to be done until he was sixteen if that was his choosing, his _choosing_. How the marks were meant to be tattooed onto his back not carved and though the process was painful and there was blood it was nowhere near as crippling. How his father had it done to _himself_ when he was an _adult_. How _he_ changed the rules _himself,_ to suit _himself_ and none of the others had had the balls to argue. How he had _lied_ to them kept him and his sister imprisoned. _Denied_ them the law-abiding _rights_ of their _own_ clan and done it all not for the Pharaoh or the cause he so championed but for his own self-righteous renown, for the glory of his own legacy of which he had such abhorrent abysmal pride as he had in his last life 3,000 years ago.

It was no wonder the Gods and even his own brother had given up on him.

Marik had hated them both then: his Father and the Pharaoh, both. But it had been too late then. He’d been so consumed with hate and grief and rage and pain, oh, so much pain, that he had embraced this life known as Hell.

The above world had not helped, either. Where corruption ran rampant as much as it had in the darkness and the shadows.

Marik had quickly grown disillusioned. He’d targeted and selected the Rare Hunters specifically because they were, as he saw them, irredeemable. That way he’d feel no shame in punishing him when they eventually failed him, deciding when he inherited the Pharaoh’s power to rid the world if all its corruption.

How naive he had been, to think that he could save the world by conquering it.

Yes, for so long Marik thought and saw life only as Hell.

It was all he had known.

All he’d felt.

And he had believed it.

And believed it well...

...until he looked into his Millennium Rod and saw the face of an angel.

An angel who made his heart beat for the first time in so many years...

An angel who made him question everything he did and had done and was about to do.

An angel who looked at him like he was more than the sum of his birth, his name, the destiny forced upon him, like he was everything in the world.

An angel who despite the blood on his hands, the pain he had caused and the misery he had wrought upon both he and his friends, had pleaded and worked with the Pharaoh to save him.

And angel who offered him redemption and a second chance in the form of a new life.

And angel who, along with the Gods, had helped him to finally learn to forgive himself.

An angel who now slept so peacefully tucked in his arms with his own wrapped around their sweet baby boy with corn silk hair and mocha brown skin like his and his angel’s eyes.

An angel who stirred awake, rubbed his eyes, saw whose arms he was in and smiles a low-eyed sleepy smile while their little boy yawned a loud, enormous yawn.

“Hey you,” his angel smiles.

“Hey Yugi,” Marik smiles back and kisses his lips. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Yugi sighs, pulls Anubis into Marik’s lap, the baby boy ecstatic to see his daddy.

When Yugi kisses him again, Marik realizes what he’s finally learned.

That despite all the pain, the tears, the suffering: life is not Hell.

It is Heaven.

**Author's Note:**

> Marik is one of my fav characters...I know people who have been the victims of child abuse and ow difficult it can be to overcome, which is why thought I can probably come up with a ton of non-bias scenarios for all the absentee parents in Yu-Gi-Oh (except Gozoboro, duh) I have absolutely NO sympathy for Marik's father...I don't care to know what that asshole was thinking there is not excuse for what he did (and in case you missed the reference, he's the reincarnation of Aknadin, yeah THAT guy...Takehashi confirmed it, which explains a lot but still)  
> Anyway, just wanted to add that.
> 
> On a happier note...BABY ANUBIS RETURNS!!!


End file.
